Jackie Robinson’s widow says film ‘42’ hits home Breaking barriers

When the taunts at the ballpark grew too fierce and the naysayers too loud, her husband, Jackie, would come home to their Brooklyn apartment and the couple would try to block out the world.

“So many people are curious about how we were at home, thinking that we brought all the anger and chaos in there with us,” Rachel Robinson, 90, said last week as she perched behind a desk at the gleaming offices of the education foundation she runs in lower Manhattan. “But we had a pledge to each other that we were going to try to keep the house a haven. Someplace safe. Someplace we didn’t have to replay the mess outside.”

That “mess,” and the need to take sanctuary from it, hit its peak in spring 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers’ No. 42 became the first African American to play Major League Baseball. More than 65 years later, Rachel Robinson vividly recalls the death threats her husband faced from fans, the teammates who refused to play with him, the managers around the game who said he didn’t belong — the “whole experiment,” as she and her husband, who died in 1972 at age 53, called his crossing into the all-white league.

Though that breakthrough transformed professional sports, and the saga was more dramatic than countless other ballpark films, Rachel Robinson resisted a Jackie Robinson movie for decades. None of the producer pitches she heard over the years could do the story justice, she felt; nothing captured what the young couple really endured.

But a few years ago, Robinson sold the rights to financier and producer Thomas Tull of Legendary Pictures (“The Dark Knight”) and gave her blessing to studio Warner Bros. and writer-director Brian Helgeland, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “L.A. Confidential.” On Friday, “42,” the first big-screen look in more than a half-century at that pivotal season, will hit theaters.

In 1947, Robinson batted .297 and was named the National League rookie of the year. But “42” is less interested in the player’s skills than his crucibles — a Montreal Royals minor-league game in which he responded to a hateful pitcher by cannily baiting him into a balk, or a Philadelphia Phillies contest in which Robinson was harshly taunted by Ben Chapman, the team’s segregationist manager, but held his tongue.

Rachel Robinson said she warmed to the idea of a movie about Jack, never Jackie — as the march of time and integration left a new generation increasingly ignorant of those days before the civil-rights era. A film, she thought, offered the opportunity to educate people growing up in Barack Obama’s America about those charged days, when black fans in the South were seated separately beyond the outfield wall, and some restaurants wouldn’t seat her or her husband at all.

“I was getting older, and I really wanted kids to know who Jack was and to think about what they can do with their own lives,” said Robinson, who met her husband when the two were studying at UCLA.

And though she might not put it that way, the film also offered a more personal opportunity for Robinson: the chance to relive a relationship that ended way too soon.

“After Rachel saw the movie for the first time I said, ’What did you think?’” recalled “42” writer-director Helgeland. “And she said, ‘I loved how much we kissed.’ And then she got emotional. It was the only thing she ever said to me about the finished film. And it hit me: Her take-away from the whole thing was that she got to see her husband one more time.”

“42” stars the Brooklyn-raised, Oxford-educated newcomer Chadwick Boseman, at once warm and stoic, pioneering and workmanlike, as Jackie Robinson, while the role of Rachel — Jackie’s emotional ballast and new bride — is played with appropriate steadfastness by Nicole Beharie (“Shame”). A lively, cigar-chomping Harrison Ford portrays Dodgers President Branch Rickey, conveying a noble opportunism as he breaks baseball’s color barrier for reasons both moral and capitalistic. Hamish Linklater embodies young pitcher Ralph Branca, one of Robinson’s few welcoming teammates.

Rachel Robinson was an essential counterbalance to her husband, say those who knew them, including Branca, now 87 and the last surviving member of the ’47 Dodgers.

“She would cool him down if he needed to be cooled down and lift him up if he needed a boost,” said Branca, who served as an important resource for both Helgeland and Linklater. “People don’t understand how important that was to a man who was not allowed to show his emotions.”

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